Oracles

This book presents 123 calling cards of artists (painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, graphic designers, illustrators etc.) from the 18th century to the present day. The facsimiled cards are slipped like bookmarks into a book by several authors on the history of the use of calling cards, the social context in which they were produced, and related historical and fictional narratives. The often unexpected graphic qualities of these personalized objects, each designed to capture an individual identity within the narrow confines of a tiny rectangle card, implicitly recount a history of taste and typographic codes in the West. But this calling card collection also lays the foundations for a microhistory of art, inspired by the Italian microstoria, or a looser narrative that breaks free from geographic contexts and historical periods. We can imagine how social networks were formed before the advent of Facebook, and how artists defined themselves in the social sphere, whether they were students or teachers, dean of the art school or museum curator, founder of a journal, firm, restaurant or political party, and so on. Superimposed on this imaginary or idealized network formed by chance encounters is a living network of students of art or history, historians or anthropologists, librarians, archivists, gallerists, museum curators and artists themselves, the network upon which this pocket museum is constructed. The sheer variety of perspectives and stories brought together here makes this book a prodigious forum for discussion -- from publisher.